I would like to be able to reward writers with bonuses based upon the amount of traffic their individual posts receive, to encourage them to promote their posts on the internet. Is there a platform that supports this automatically out of the box?

3 Answers
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I'd be interested in this as well. I think a makeshift solution could be done through Google Analytics, simply append a tracking ID to each article that relates to an author then you should be able to get a report that shows traffic by author in you GA account. The tracking ID could presumably be auto appended without requiring programming via the URL settings in your admin (if you're using Wordpress).

Most applications don't bother tracking traffic at all, since there are dedicated analytics tools that will pretty much always do it better.

There's a decent chance you're already using Google Analytics, though, and this can be done with it without too much work, using custom variables. (Basically _gaq.push(['_setCustomVar',1,'author','AUTHORNAME']);)
Then you'd just need to check the report at whatever interval you want to figure out the bonuses.

It seems like you probably don't want to mess with the GA code yourself. Yoast's Google Analytics plugin will set that up for you with a toggle, along with options for tracking a lot of other things you might also find you're interested in. It covers a lot of stuff, so here's a screencast covering this particular function, along with where to go within GA to actually view the per-author tracking data.

I think the easiest way to do this would be to tie it to some sort of advertising system (of course maybe I just think this way because I built an advertising system). Ad systems are built to track impressions and a number of them will break that up based on the site that it came from. You could then reward the individual bloggers based on the number of impressions they generated a month.